Delay in completion of convergent real time billing (CRTB) project of Nepal Telecom (NT) has affected it in promoting different services in GSM mobile. That is not all — even customers have been deprived from availing services at cheaper rates.
GSM mobile is the major service segment of NT with around nine million customers. NT officials said that since the CRTB project is being carried out and implemented in phase-wise manner, its full implementation was taking time. The project will allow NT to launch different schemes like data service package in GSM mobile and other value added services.
The project also enables customers to make payments for different services easily. Once the project comes into full implementation it will help serve all customers of existing and upcoming networks of the company and achieve true convergence of provisioning, customer support, revenue collection, service control, network resource management, customer self care and other activities related to service delivery, and control and management, according to NT.
“The CRTB will come into full implementation from November this year,” said Budhi Prasad Acharya, acting managing director of NT,
while addressing a press conference about the company’s plan for the current fiscal year. He added that after the company implements the billing project for GSM service, they will be able to come up with various schemes for customers.
Asia Info Linkage Technologies, based in Singapore, has signed an agreement with NT to implement the CRTB project at a cost of Rs two billion. NT has already implemented CRTB in CDMA service after which it had introduced schemes in data packages in Sky Pro data service.
Normally, it costs less while using data in packages. Using data service under packages costs below Re 0.25 per MB; however in GSM its cost a flat Re 0.50 per MB.
Acharya also said that the company is not in a position to make immediate reduction in price of data service. “Of the total income from data, 70-75 per cent goes for payment of bandwidth cost to international companies,” he added. As per him, to bring the bandwidth payment cost down, the company has been
working on a ‘re-engineering’ plan which will not require payment for bandwidth to access contents already downloaded or accessed.
In the current fiscal year, NT is investing Rs 18 billion for different projects. It has a target to add 2.25 million new customers in voice
service including two million in GSM service. Focusing on the data segment, the company had set a target to cover all 75 districts with 3G service, WiMax and CDMA data services.
